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Early parenting is exhausting and it doesn’t help that every choice and decision seems like it might make or break our kid in the future, including the tinyest things. Because the stakes are so high there’s a lot of motivated reasoning and there are always a dozen articles and hundreds of videos confirming our parenting bias - it’s pretty confusing.
The abundance of information is mind-boggling, at least half of what’s out there has been deemed false or potentially harmful, making it much harder for us to make informed and unemotional decisions on what is best for our kid, and for us.
The most debated topic at the moment is whether or not to sleep train our kid. Sleep is important, as confirmed by this analysis of over 900 studies. Ongoing sleep problems can negatively affect children's cognitive development, mood regulation, behavior, and health.
To sleep train is consequently also an important decision. It involves letting your child cry in a controlled environment to teach them to sleep independently. When it comes to this ****the internet is a jungle of opinions ranging from accusations of cruelty to prayers of gratitude.
The debate centers between two opposing camps: Sleep training is safe, quick, and effective vs sleep training is potentially harmful and doesn’t always work. Note the “potentially” as it’ll be important later.
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If there is a quick and effective method to help everyone get more sleep – that’s awesome. On the other hand, if it becomes apparent that there is a downside – we need to know.
Sleep training is often dubbed as “cry-it-out” which comes with a lot of negative weight, but the truth is far from it.
This media landscape shifts cultural standards and influences the parenting opinions of our friends, some of whom would openly disapprove of our decision to sleep train our son.
But…
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Prompted by Emily Oster's book, I analysed published medical literature conducted by professionals in the field to find out what the science has to say about sleep training.
A review of 52 treatment studies by a task force appointed by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, across all studies, 94% report that behavioral interventions were efficacious, with over 80% of children treated demonstrating clinically significant improvement that was maintained for 3 to 6 months.